I Know, Lets Blame The Victim.

We see it all the time when a person from an oppressed community is attacked that they are re-victimized; she shouldn’t have been wearing a skirt that short, he was in the wrong neighborhood, he was flaunting that he is gay. No one deserves to be raped, beating or harassed. Nowhere do we see this more than in our schools.

Here in Connecticut, a trans-girl came out in high school and she was bullied and harassed. So what did the school do to correct the harassment? They transferred her to a school for troubled youth, there by punishing her for being the victim. What happened to the bully? He went on to bully other students in the school once she was gone and as a result, they transferred him to the school for troubled youth. There he found his old victim and started to bully her again, forcing her to quite school.

A couple of years ago the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) issued a report in 2005, here are some of the highlights from the report.

The online survey, conducted between January 13 and January 31, 2005, reveals that bullying is common in America’s schools, and that some students are frequent targets for verbal and physical harassment:

* Two-thirds (65%) of teens report that they have been verbally or physically harassed or assaulted during the past year because of their perceived or actual appearance, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, race/ethnicity, disability or religion.
* The reason most commonly cited for being harassed frequently is a student’s appearance, as four in ten (39%) teens report that students are frequently harassed for the way they look or their body size.
* The next most common reason for frequent harassment is sexual orientation. One-third (33%) of teens report that students are frequently harassed because they are or are perceived to be lesbian, gay or bisexual.

The survey finds that LGBT students are three times as likely as non-LGBT students to say that they do not feel safe at school (22% vs. 7%) and 90% of LGBT students (vs. 62% of non-LGBT teens) have been harassed or assaulted during the past year.

However, student do not have to be LGBT to be harassed, GLSEN reported that,

NEW YORK, April 9, 2009 - An 11-year-old Massachusetts boy, Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, hanged himself Monday after enduring bullying at school, including daily taunts of being gay, despite his mother's weekly pleas to the school to address the problem. This is at least the fourth suicide of a middle-school aged child linked to bullying this year.

In another bullying case in South Hadley Massachusetts a girl committed suicide because she was being bullying because some of the other girls in her class were jealous of her. In addition, the school took no action when they became aware of the bullying. On MassLive.com they write that,

Prince's harassment was common knowledge to most students, faculty, staff and administrators, Scheibel said. The district attorney's investigation determined, however, that the school officials' actions, or lack of action, did not rise to the level of criminal conduct, she said during a press conference at her offices

Michael C. LaSala, Ph.D. in Psychology Today writes about Gay bullying in school, he writes…

Unfortunately, for some of these kids [LGBT], their peers figured out what was up. Adolescents are hawk-eyed guardians of the status quo, harshly punishing those whose behavior falls outside of society's narrow gender norms--and for some of the unlucky respondents in my study who inadvertently revealed cross-gendered behavior, the consequences were brutal.
[…]
Furthermore, research shows that such harassment can have a devastating effect on LGBT kids' mental health and suicide risk. The wounds persist well into adulthood, making LGBT people prone to depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem as the experiences of my clients and research respondents indicate.

As we have seen, it is not only LGBT children that are harassed and bullied, but also straight kids and that many of the victims turn to suicide to end their torment. The affects of low self-esteem can have life long consequences, I know first hand, I was one of those under achievers. Dr. LaSala goes on to write about some of the remedies…

Most of us who are mental health providers or educators are comfortable working with our young charge one-on-one or in the classroom--but when we start thinking about changing the systems that affect these kids' lives--well that's another story. And it's no wonder--it's a tricky task to confront school and community politics and policies in a way that is effective but hopefully doesn't endanger our jobs. However, if we really want to help gay and lesbian and also bisexual and transgender kids, we must step out of our offices and classrooms-leaving our comfort zones behind.
[…]
As a first step, an environmental assessment would be in order. Is the school a place that welcomes and accepts LGBT students? Are there any openly LGBT faculty? Does the school sponsor a LGBT support group? Is material on LGBT people incorporated into programs that educate students about diversity? During my research I noticed that kids who attended schools that had such resources reported considerably less harassment than those who went to schools that did not. How is antigay bullying and harassment between peers addressed at the institutional level? Do school professionals intervene or simply ignore it?

Here in Connecticut we have a strong GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) in a number of schools around the state. We also have an anti-bullying law that is suppose to protect our children from bullying and the town Boards of Education are suppose to issue an annual report on bullying in their towns. But you would be surprised at the number of school districts that report zero incidents of bullying in their towns, do you really think that a town has not one case of bullying in their system? We need to put some teeth in to the anti-bullying statutes.

On the federal level, we need to pass the Safe Schools Improvement Act that was just introduced in the Senate last week that is a similar bill to the House bill H.R. 2262. The bill will protect students from bullying and harassment in our nation's schools. The bill includes protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity/expression.